Make the forums more forum like?

I really wish that one could easily watch a topic, or at very less RSS it. It's really not efficient to have to manually watch a topic you either created, responded to, or are interested in.

Looks like these forums are home made to match the rest of Tooledo stylistically; however, much is lost of what one typically expects from a product support community. Something like vBulletin could be pretty easy to slip in here at very reasonable cost. It is widely supported and easy to customize... by moving in that direction Tooledo would get an even deeper sense of community which help in further marketing the product (e.g. more sales).

We do plan to add these things in future updates, potentially with some nice integration with your to-do list. So, say you are watching a topic. When it receives a new post, it could create a task for you called "Read this reply..." with a link. That kind of cool stuff can't be done using third-party software.

Jake you have a great product, and there seems to be a lot of integrity to your operation. This thread is really being shared with the spirit of how do we help you make this all be even better.

I was previously using Nozbe, and I believe that Michael, Nozbe's owner made some very serious business and operational mistakes in terms of building the latest version.

His community was pretty vocal, and he alienated a lot of them (myself included), to the point where some forum posters made mention of Toodledo (that's how I found out about you). I'm not suggesting that you are not paying attention to the users, but if you work your way back through the forum messages you will see many occassions where you indicate that you are working on something (e.g. forums, or workgroup enhancements) that seem to be left out there hanging.

Michael from Nozbe made lots and lots or promises, and got amazingly bogged down so that he missed deadlines that he had publically commited to, and then of course he launched product that was truly buggy and flawed and unusuable upon initial release. My read as a business owner is his product had great promise, but he was struggling with running it as a business. I wasn't willing to live through his struggles, especially when good alternatives existed. After all, products like these are just tools.

I suspect that you have a very very long list of items that you would like to do, but can only get to the most important ones because of resource constraints. I think most of us here are patient and are sensitive to that, but what we are telling you in these various threads is that our ability to interact with you and each other is critical to working with your product.

So I'm with Proximo who says "the rest of the world runs forums just fine." Going down the 3rd party route can be handled in a secure fashion... it's truly worth thinking about.

I think after some time using Toodledo you will find that the active and continual development is one of the things that separates this website from similar ones (like Nozbe, where I came here from incidentally). Toodledo keeps track of suggestions, etc. in the forums by linking them to related tasks in their own to do list. So there is no reason to worry that something will be forgotten because the forums can't be subscribed to, etc. When Toodledo tags a thread with the "Thanks for the suggestion" that links it to their to do list. Many people, myself included, really prefer the home-brewed forums to some off the shelf forum. I would like some of the features those types of systems provide, but I really don't think it is necessary. If Toodledo can work subscribing to threads with email updates, etc. and a private messaging system into these forums then we would really be set.

I share your desire for Toodledo to have more resources so that we can implement more requested functionality at a faster pace. We are working very hard on Toodledo and we are constantly improving it.

We do plan to continue to improve the forums. This is important to us because it allows the community to help each other, which frees us up to spend more time working on the website.

Watchlists and private messaging are both things that we plan to add, and we have ideas for ways to make these features integrated into the rest of Toodledo in ways that are not possible with 3rd party software. The example I mentioned above is just one of the ideas that we have.